


Wooden Nickels (a love story)

by vanillafluffy



Category: The Three Investigators | Die drei ??? - Various Authors, The Trixie Belden Mysteries - Julie Campbell Tatham & Kathryn Kenny
Genre: Americana, F/M, Flashbacks, Gen, Great Depression, Hobo nickels, Inheritance, Memories, Non-Linear Narrative, Oral History, Storytelling, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 17:20:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15868206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillafluffy/pseuds/vanillafluffy
Summary: Trixie's friendship with Mr. Przewalski prompts him to share pieces of his past.





	Wooden Nickels (a love story)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Brumeier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brumeier/gifts).



Across the street from Jones Salvage Yard is the simple frame house where Mr. Przewalski lives. The old man is on oxygen now, battling emphysema, but still managing to get around the home where he lived for many years with his wife. She’s been dead for nearly fifteen years and while he still misses her dearly, there’s a new woman in his life now.

Every morning, he struggles to the kitchen to percolate a pot of coffee. Once he’s had his eye-opener, he gets dressed--he must look good for her; it’s the least he can do when she’s so good to him.

Then he limps out to the front porch with his portable tank, settling into the rocking chair that his wife had loved so much. She’ll be here soon, he knows, the sunshine of his old age….

He and Sylvie hadn’t had any children…not for want of trying. She’d been an only child, and he lost track of what family he had…oh Lord, 19-and thirty-something…before the war, anyway, when he’d been ‘on the bum’, as they used to call it. (Years later, he’d sent a Christmas card to the old farm and it came back stamped, ‘Moved, Left No Forwarding Address’.) Sometimes, when Southern California shakes from seismic tremors, Mr. Przewalski awakens from vague dreams of riding trains, rattling and rumbling across the country and back again.

Now that he’s alone, he laments the lack of kin; they’re the ones who are supposed to be there for you, aren’t they? The government isn’t any goldurn help. He gets his little bit of money every month, but they won’t send a visiting nurse or anybody out to help him--they’d rather see him in some home, sitting in a corner and pissing into a diaper like he was two instead of ninety-seven. He breathes as deeply as his damaged lungs will allow. The situation makes him angry…he’d been an angry young man, back when he was roaming around the country, no proper jobs to be had. Then came the war, horrors in the Pacific and he’d mustered out here on the West Coast….

Sylvie was the only thing that had stopped him from returning to his rootless ways. Wandering around Rocky Beach looking for work…the Jones brothers had a war-surplus store and they’d needed help sorting some of their junk, everything from ‘Mae West’ jackets to empty ammo boxes, even a couple old Jeeps…the nice lady who lived in this house came over to ask if they had something--a spring, a bolt--he can’t recall--but she’d smiled at him, the most refined, elegant woman he’d ever seen in his life, and that was that. He was in love.

There’s a flash of blue, and Mr. Przewalski sits a little taller in his rocking chair. That’s her car. He can see the top of it over the hedge between his driveway and the salvage yard parking lot. He hears the voice of the storyteller of the book she’s listening to. Then the engine turns off, the voice cut short. There’s her happy face, curly hair like a golden dandelion, a smile like sunshine.

“Hiya, Mr. P!” she hails him.

“Hello, yourself, young lady.” Most mornings, she has ‘a little something’ for him. What about today? Every little bit she saves him in grocery money is that much more for his prescriptions.

Sure enough, she trots over to the sidewalk leading to his front steps. Must be nice to have so much energy!

“I brought you a little something to go with your coffee,” she beams. “And some lunch.”

“You sure are good to an old coot like me. What is it?” His sniffer is as old as the rest of him, and he doesn’t rightly know what the brown slabs in the Tupperware box are.

“It’s kind of an experiment,” she admits. “It’s like a blondie, but I used pumpkin puree instead of oil to make it less fatty. There’s pumpkin pie spice for flavor…I know you said you have trouble with nuts, so I substituted chopped dates. Mart and Ben already want me to make another batch, but I saved these just for you!”

Trixie is always so…what was that word his mama used to use? Winsome, that’s it. Like when Sylvie smiled at him that first time, so sweet and honest. Of course, she’s easily young enough to be his granddaughter…that young Jones boy is gone on her--and who can blame him? (Hard to believe--Mr. Przewalski still remembers Titus and this one’s daddy capering around the yard whooping and hollering and carrying on.) Still, if the younger generation has kids like her in it, the world may not be so bad.

He’s long since given her the run of the house; she goes in and returns minus lunch (It’ll be waiting for him in the fridge, he knows from experience, if she doesn’t return and retrieve it for him.) and with coffee just the way he likes it.

The pumpkin-date bar is chewy and satisfying. “Thank you, Trixie. That’s real good.”

“Great! I’m glad you like it! I’ll be back at lunchtime, okay?”

“Don’t take any wooden nickels!” he calls after her as he always does.

A few hours later, over lunch, Trixie asks, “Mr. P., what does that even mean, ‘Don’t take any wooden nickels’? Nickels didn’t used to be make out of wood--did they?”

“No…” Her lively curiosity makes him smile. “Back when I was a young fellow, saloons would give you a wooden token for a free drink when you settled up your account. It was their way of getting you back in there, because it wasn’t good anywhere else.”

She nods, biting her full lower lip, thinking about that.

Wooden nickels…maybe he should show her…nobody’s seen them in a great many years, not even him. He gave it up after Sylvia died, because his hands shook too much, but mostly because there was no one to show them to…. “There’s an old cigar box,” he says at last. “In the closet that back bedroom, all the way to the left, next to a pair of brown and white oxfords. Maybe you wouldn’t mind bringing it out here for me?”

Yes, indeed, it must be nice to be able to jump up from a chair like that. No knees complaining, no back protesting or getting dizzy from the danged blood pressure medications…youth really is wasted on the young!

It’s smaller than he remembers, seeing it in her hands, but when she sets it on his lap, it’s far heavier than he recalls. Over the years, it’s taken on the dimensions of something much bigger and more important. He pauses, gazing thoughtfully at the lid boasting White Owl cigars before opening it, as if, like Pandora, he’ll release more than he bargained for.

Trixie catches some of his hesitation. “What’s in there, Mr. P.?” she asks in a hushed whisper.

“My youth.”

Folded neatly on top of the contents is a tattered linen dish towel. He’d bought Sylvie a set of new ones when he’d taken it, because the pictures on it of the two lovey-dovey birds always made him think of them as a couple.

Beneath that, atop multiple paper cylinders and a deteriorating sandwich baggie, are a half-dozen slender steel tools.

“Are those…dental instruments?” Trixie guesses, peering at them.

“That they are. I swiped most of them from a dentist’s office in Council Bluffs, Iowa, back in…1935, I believe it was. I went in saying I had a toothache, and while his back was turned, getting some cotton or something, I made believe I was going to throw up, grabbed them and knocked the rest of his tray all over the place. Then I allowed that maybe I wasn’t up to having any work done, and I vamoosed with my ill-gotten gains.”

“But what in the world did you want with them?”

He smiles. “A little hobby of mine. I know I’ve told you I spent a few years jumping trains and roaming around…?” She nods. “Well, we didn’t get a lot of real cash money, and we had to make every scrap of it work for us. Open one of those rolls, Trixie.”

“They’re…nickels?” 

“Look closer.”

She gasps. “That’s a horse on the back--I thought nickels used to have buffaloes…?”

“They did.” He chuckles. “That’s how they left the Mint, at any rate. But quite a few of us fellows used to rework them…they were curiosities, so sometimes we could trade them for more than face value.”

Trixie sits riveted as he shows her the patient work of years. Funny how he can’t remember what’s in his pantry from day to day, but he can spin yarns about things that happened eighty years ago. How this one with the elephant was done while he was traveling with a small circus, Lambeth, Lefferts, something like that. Or the one with the map of Africa was what he was working on when he heard the news about Pearl Harbor. 

He enlisted in the Navy in January of 1942 and discovered that his cherished hobby didn’t exactly translate well to shipboard, unless the seas were calm. Still, he’d done King Kong and Sherlock Holmes and…that one was supposed to be Mount Rushmore, but he’d scored Lincoln’s face when a torpedo missed them by the skin of their teeth…and he’d done that other one from a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge….

All the stories that have been pent up for so long come pouring out. Trixie is a good listener; she asks questions, carefully timed. Where was he when he did this one? What gave him the inspiration for that? Are these all of his nickels? Did he make more?

“Oh, sure, there were others. I traded some, gave away others to my shipmates. Sometimes, a guy would bring me a picture and ask if I could etch that for him. I’d get paid with things like chocolate bars, cigarettes and toiletries. A good deal for me!” He can still recall his cabin on the _Baltimore_ , walls more ivory than white from smoke, sitting on the bed and trying not to stab his hand with the pick as the ship rocked….

“You don’t do them anymore?”

“I thought I might take it up again after I had my cataracts done,” he sighs. “But that was right about the time Sylvie got diagnosed--all I thought of then was taking the best care of her that I could. And later, I was all alone, I thought it would give me something to do, but my hands shook too much. It’s hell, getting old….Here, let me show you the last good one I ever did.”

He finds it, wrapped in a little square of chamois and tucked into a corner of the box. The Indian’s head on the front has been transformed into a woman’s profile, and she’s wearing a tiara. He’d used Sylvie as the model; it doesn’t quite resemble her, but it’s still some of his best work. He’s proud of the detail in that tiara. “I did that back in 1985, or thereabouts.”

“They didn’t still make buffalo nickels then, did they?”

He’s starting to wheeze from talking so much. “That’s what that baggie is,” he tells her. “I started collecting buffaloes when they started getting scarce so I’d have spares. I got a bunch in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s…I was still carving regular then, I figured I’d be set for life.”

“Thank you for showing them to me. They’re beautiful.”

“I want you to have them, Trixie.” He speaks slowly, deliberately. “They’re about the all I have that’s really important. I know you’ll take care of them…you listen to my stories, maybe someday you’ll pass them on to your kids--no, I said someday, don’t hurry on my account…the thing is, you care. You’ve been good to me, I want you to have something to remember me by when I’m gone.” He stops, breathing as deeply as he can from the nasal canula. “No use pretending--I’m not going to last forever, you know. I’d like it if somebody, years after I’m gone, could say, ‘My mama knew the man who made these, and he told her--’”

He runs out of breath, but Trixie doesn’t panic. It takes him longer and longer to get back to normal after these episodes--has she noticed?

As he tries to regulate his breathing, the Jones boy comes trotting across the street, wanting to know why his girl has been gone for two hours on her lunch break. She gets flustered and apologizes; cute, the way her cheeks get so pink…they’ve been having the most fascinating conversation, she tells him. 

“Thank you very, very much,” she says, leaning over to peck the man in the rocking chair on one withered cheek. “I will take extra special good care of them. Your stories will live on, I promise. I’d better get back to work now!”

“What’s that?” the Jones boy asks her as they retreat from the porch, Trixie cradling the cigar box in her arms. 

Mr. Przewalski doesn’t hear soft-voiced her reply to Jupiter’s question. Too bad he isn’t fifty years younger--but fifty years ago, he’d had Sylvie….

He gets a good lungful and calls after her, “Don’t take any wooden nickels, Trixie!”

 

…


End file.
